Lecture Reflection Blog
Having been lucky enough to receive a privileged upbringing and generally being personally unaffected by the most pressing societal issues, social responsibility was the theme that initially jumped out at me as the one I could engage with most effectively. I was particularly taken with the ‘Making for Change’ initiative that Claire Swift touched upon in her lecture. This is certainly something I would like to engage with in future, predominantly because this is an obvious way that I can put my privilege to use to help others; others ways were not as simple as it is educational rather than monetary. I think the fact that it is with female prisoners makes it all the more worthy as they are such an overlooked sect of society, as is much of the population within correctional facilities naturally because they are by definition out of sight for the mainstream. This relates to a crucial point that Lorraine Gamman touches on in her lecture on empathy while referencing the writing Roman Krznarick. He wrote ‘empathy withers and dies when we fail to acknowledge the humanity of other people’ (Krznarick 2014), and this is a prominent issue for the prison population who, being that step removed from society, are often reduced to a statistic. This interest is certainly not true altruism on my part though, I am sceptical that exists at all. I believe that ‘the creative journey enables reflection and provides a safe space to evaluate life’ (Albertson, in Wilkinson 2015). Therefore while operating in the creative realm of empathy, you are not only helping the less fortunate party but opening the door to significant personal and artistic growth for yourself, a suspicion affirmed in this project by the student response. Something that I feel I have only truly appreciated since I started my higher education is that beauty is authenticity, whether that be the pureness of simplicity or the intricacy of complexity. This makes it apt that the inmates are weaving as I imagine that many of their stories revolve around hardship, and it takes a certain level of detail to truly forget the prejudice and engage with their real, human stories instead. As it is ‘the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives and using that understanding to guide your actions’, empathy can also then be evoked through artwork and thus a third party, the viewer, enters into this beneficial cycle. My conclusion is then that the project is a win-win-win situation. I also found that this seemed to overlap organically with the other themes, for example the up cycling of waste bound high vis vests, not to mention the boundary breaking inclusivity of the concept.
Krznarick, R. (2014). The Empathy Instinct [p. 38]. London: Rider Books.
Krznarick, R. (2014). The Empathy Instinct [p. 42]. London: Rider Books.